I also ran into a problem with InDesign crashing if I executed an export command too quickly after the merge. The 20 hours that it used to take to merge 4,000 records is down to about 35 minutes all told. The PDF merge is actually very quick, and the result is that it takes roughly 2 minutes for each merge of ~250 records. I export the resulting workflows as PDF documents and then, using the Acrobat 7.0 Pro library, merge all of the resulting PDF documents into one master workflow. I was able to work around this issue by breaking down my merges into batches of roughly 200 to 250 records, which seems to be the sweet spot. Merges over 300 records would stall or hang for hours upon hours, sometimes overnight. I was unable to find a solution that allowed me to merge anything over 250 records with reliable results in a timely manner. Just updating for the sake of keeping a record for future reference: Thanks for replying! RE: Data merge optimization? jmgalvin (TechnicalUser) 18 May 06 19:42 In that case, I think my only hope is to get into the InDesign Server program as a partner and pray that the "Server" version without the GUI is more efficient than the desktop publishing version. If 4GB of system memory isn't enough, then shame on Adobe for creating such a horribly inefficient means for merging data. If it improves but doesn't work, I have room for another 1GB on top of that. I had the IT guy order me 3GB of memory, so we'll see what happens then. I think the bottom line is that 512MB of system memory is far too little for the task at hand. I'm running 4.0.2 and double checked the Adobe website to make sure it is the most recent release - It is. If there's a way to disable this, I haven't found it. I wish I could disable Acrobat automatically opening the PDFs that I export. The alternative is to not export (I am running multiple consequetive merges), but then I am stuck with tons of memory taken up by big merged InD documents open. It would defeat the whole purpose of the development project.Īnother unfortunate side effect that I can't seem to avoid is that when I export to a PDF, it automatically opens Acrobat. There are something like 15 different character styles involved and I can't get away from that. This is not a typical mail merge I'm actually dynamically creating laser printed tickets with all kinds of varying fonts and formating. The project *requires* a large number of different character styles. I killed all unnecessary processes including virus scanners and the like.įonts are probably killing me, here. Unfortunately, I have to have the Visual Basic app running while the merge occurs since this is a fully automated process. I've tried running as "light" as possible. RE: Data merge optimization? jmgalvin (TechnicalUser) 18 May 06 12:07 If anyone has any similar experiences to share or recommendations, I would very much appreciate it. I'm wondering if a computer with 4GB+ of system memory would help, or if the problem would just continue to spiral out of control with 100,000+ record merges requiring 30GB of system memory to execute properly. I can't find a way to convert all of the text objects to a single vector object (They are dynamically generated by VB code, so I can't import from Illustrator or anything). We're talking about 30 text objects per record, 14 records on each page - so figure about 420 objects on each page. I think the main thing that is hurting me is the sheer number of objects on each page. The final merges will be thousands of records, so to encounter problems with just a few hundred is rather discouraging. Setting a maximum number of records per document (To no effect). Hiding the windows while the data merge takes place. I'm wondering if anyone has found solutions to this that are not documented data merge options. Anything over a few hundred records (Fourteen of which fit on each page, so we're only talking 20-ish pages) causes it to stall. These aren't terribly large merges by any measure. I'm running into some serious issues with my data merges in InDesign CS2 - The software sucks memory until it is using 350MB/512MB of system memory and inflates the page file to 1.2GB, at which point the program just begins to hang.
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